Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Take your list and put one letter beside each thing. U if something real goes wrong today when it slips, I if it moves you towards something you care about. Plenty of tasks get both and plenty get neither, and seeing that is half the value. What you are doing is refusing to decide by which task is shouting loudest. Anything with an I and no U will never feel pressing, which is precisely why those things vanish for years.
They are those who are neither wasteful nor niggardly when they spend, but keep to a just balance (Quran 25:67). Hours are spent much like money, and a balance has to be judged rather than felt.
الفرقان
وَٱلَّذِينَ إِذَآ أَنفَقُواْ لَمۡ يُسۡرِفُواْ وَلَمۡ يَقۡتُرُواْ وَكَانَ بَيۡنَ ذَٰلِكَ قَوَامࣰ ا
They are those who are neither wasteful nor niggardly when they spend, but keep to a just balance
Qur’an 25:67read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A study of 124 adults with ADHD following twelve weeks of a manualised programme compared those also taking medication with those who were not, across core symptoms, emotional symptoms, self esteem and everyday functioning. Sorting tasks is the sort of skill such programmes teach, though the study weighed the package rather than the parts. Read it as background support for structured skills work, not as a test of this particular rule.
Pan MR, Huang F, Zhao MJ, Wang YF, Wang YF, Qian QJ. (2019). A comparison of efficacy between cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and CBT combined with medication in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).. Psychiatry research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A rule applied from outside gives you a way to sort tasks on the days when the feeling of urgency is not telling you the truth.
If most of the difficulty is happening at home, most of the work needs to happen with the household in the room. Otherwise the hour of good conversation gets quietly undone by Tuesday.
Some things only happen when another person is there, even if they are doing something entirely different. Ring a friend and clean your two kitchens together with the phone on the counter.
If it is out of sight it is gone, so build the system around what you can see. Clothes on an open shelf and books in the drawer is a perfectly good arrangement when that is what works.